Everyone knows what happened to Oscar Wilde and Alan Turing, but gay history doesn’t start or end there. Tens of thousands of men were persecuted by the State for their love. Back in 1897 in Dewsbury, England, twelve ordinary working men fell foul of a harsh legal system and were prosecuted for a victimless crime:...

England’s ‘gay’ kings and queens defied society – during perhaps the most homophobic era of human history – to have same-sex lovers. Of 41 monarchs since William The Conqueror, we’ve identified seven who were likely lesbian, gay or bisexual. That’s an incredible 17%. And they include some of the most famous rulers in British history....

In the late 16th century, the famous French essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote about two marriages between people of the same sex. The first involved women in eastern France, the second a group of men in Rome. At the time, same-sex marriages were not recognized by religious or civil law, and sodomy – a term...

Over the years, I’ve written dozens of articles on queer history, and some of the most interesting figures I’ve come across have been queer women. Action, adventure, wisdom, subterfuge, determination, whimsy, lust, genius — I’ve found a wonderful range in their stories. Here are some of the more interesting things I’ve learned about history’s queer...

]]>159711 incredible trans people from history you won’t learn about in schoolhttp://ourqueerhistory.com/11-incredible-trans-people-from-history-you-wont-learn-about-in-school/
Thu, 01 Dec 2016 15:00:55 +0000http://ourqueerhistory.com/?p=1593

These amazing trans people have helped shape the world we live in today, whether through their activism, visibility or setting new legal precedents. Schools hardly feature LGBT people in history class – let alone the history of the struggle for LGBT rights – so PinkNews has compiled this list of trans people you won’t read...

Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro has died aged 90 – prompting strong debate about his time in power that included the rounding up, persecution and murder of LGBT people. Homosexuals were viewed as inherently counter-revolutionary and homosexuality was declared a “deviation incompatible with the revolution” by Castro’s regime. LGBT people, particularly gay men, were routinely sent...

On June 28, 1969, Ray “Sylvia Lee” Rivera was a 17-year-old street kid and self-described drag queen just looking for a good time on a hot summer night in Greenwich Village — a night that would mark a key turning point in the nearly two-decade-old gay civil rights movement. When I met her 20 years...

Sexuality is a topic often whitewashed out of our history books, and we rarely see the place of LGBT people in the ancient world mentioned in television documentaries. Most of us know that the ancient pagan world was more tolerant of homosexuality than the one god religions that would follow. But how tolerant were the...

“Say hi as you cruise by…cuz everybody is a star in Hollywood” –Village People, 1977 In order to find our identity, we had to leave the Eastside. “A New Gay Dawning” – Circus Disco button, courtesy of the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries. The Chicano Movement, the Civil Rights Movement,...

Emma Goldman (June 27 [O.S. June 15], 1869 – May 14, 1940) was an anarchist known for her political activism, writing, and speeches. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the 20th century. Born in Kovno, Russian Empire (present-day Kaunas,...